Have you found high school grades to be indicative of college grades?
For my kids…yes. Their HS GPAs and college GPAs were similar.
For myself…I was a good high school student, but I was an outstanding college student!
But this is not always the case. There are plenty of students with high HS GPA who find themselves getting lower grades. And there are plenty of kids with low HS GPA who excel in college.
My D was the opposite. She is getting straight As in college and never did that as a HS student. I attribute it to more maturity and getting over some emotional issues, plus she is way more engaged with classes because they are related to her major and interests. In HS she did not like a lot of subjects and could not get motivated to study for them.
Too many variables in play, including the quality of the HS/college and grade inflation or deflation at the HS/college.
i have two kids in college. Both are doing about the same as in HS; mostly all A’s; each one has one or 2 B’s.
However, the biggest difference we see with GPA is this: an A- = 3.67 in our colleges. In HS; we had A- and A all = 4.0. They both have a few A- grades in college, and that’s brought their GPA down a little. I will say, now that they are into their hard classes for their majors, they are really working hard and seem to take it all a little more seriously than HS.
Both my high school and the girls high school had A-, A and A + grades plus weighted gpa. For my daughter in college even though she is in some honors classes there is no weighted gpa. There is an A- grade and gpa but anything 93 and above is an A and there is no A plus grade now.
My daughter is a freshman in college so no semester grades yet to compare.
Generally speaking, yes (and that’s after a quarter century of working with college freshmen, although there’s plenty of research to back up my observations). However, you must realize that in any large population, there’s a huge range of individual performance. Yes, most students continue to perform in college they way they did in high school, BUT I’ve seen students admitted on probation wind up on the dean’s list first semester and more commonly (sadly) really good students crash and burn.
Over large populations, high school grades are predictive of college grades. But for an individual student, there is enough individual variation that it should not be surprising if a student earned much better or much worse grades in college than in high school.
But note that college grades generally are likely to be lower than high school grades. At the most selective colleges, A high school students will be distributed across the A and B range in college (with some C students). At moderately selective colleges, A and B high school students will be distributed across the A through C range in college.
No, college is far easier for my kid who attended a rigorous private high school where she worked very hard to stay in the middle of the class. Now top 5% at college with much less work.
Neither of my kids ever focused significantly on grades. They got good grades. #1 was not an “honors” student (3.90+ GPA) in H.S. [though had extremely high test scores], but graduated “with honors” from UChicago. However, he found it curious that when he interviewed for his first job as a business consultant the company wanted to know his college GPA as well as details about his HIGH SCHOOL activities. Q. “So, you were a champion debater in high school. What does that do for us?” His A: “Debaters read a ton of stuff, on subjects that they don’t necessarily have deep knowledge of. But I can take a complex article on any subject, read it, and write a summary in 30 minutes. And my summary will be VERY accurate.” That’s a skill that may matter in an industry that focuses on information. He got the job.
For my daughter, who attended art school (RISD) it was more important that they awarded her a “Rachael Carson Award” than that she had good grades. After all what do grades matter for artists? What matters is their talent, as reflected in their portfolio. And the award marked her significant interest in environmental design (which is still a major interest of hers now that she’s in the economy).
My point: grades matter, but extracurricular achievements – or products of your work – may matter just as much or more.
A different but related point about the relevance of grades. When we hire new faculty in my university department, we never look at undergrad GPA’s, and we hardly pay attention to graduate school grades. though we care about what courses the applicant has completed (as an indicator of skillset and potential future teaching and research).
Instead we’re mainly looking as the broad skill-set and “extracurricular” achievements. That means research, writing, publications by the grad students. Letters of recommendation matter a lot, but mainly it’s the research accomplishments (including doctoral dissertation research) and potential of the students that matters most. Teaching experience (as TA’s or faculty) and teaching evaluations by students also matter more than the applicant’s GPA.
I was surprised by how many employers have minimum gpa cutoffs for internships
Seems like research record and teaching experience are important parts of the PhD curriculum, not “extracurriculars”, while graduate-level course work and grades are merely the preparatory phase to get the new PhD student to the point of being near the frontier of knowledge where s/he can contribute original research.
Agree with the so many variables opinion. Top students may find their gpa in college is less than their HS gpa. It depends on several factors. some include the caliber of the school chosen, the caliber of other students, reaching out for classes where one may not get the A, the toughness for the student of the major (for example, choosing what is most interesting versus what is easiest). Big fish in small pond or small fish realizing there are many students out there who also got top grades and test scores but are much smarter/better educated…
Yes, many variables come into play. Both of my kids went to what I guess I’d classify as high match/low reach schools and both had slightly better GPAs in college as compared to HS. The variables I’d attribute this to include:
–They went to a very challenging public HS – the upside is that they were well prepared for college level work.
–I think both kid’s study habits/intensity improved while they were in college (ex. they seemed to start studying further in advance for major exams, got head starts on big papers/projects etc.)
–Both kids found majors that were really in their wheelhouse. Once they finished their college’s core/distribution requirements and got more into the upper level classes in their majors, both kids’ grades got better and better.
When my younger son was looking for internships his college GPA was 2.99999 which took a lot of them out of the running. His grades got better every year and senior year he was on the Dean’s List both semesters. He’d been a B+ to A- student in high school.
My older son was just the opposite. He was on the Dean’s List freshman year, but never again. I didn’t actually see his transcript though he was perfectly forthcoming about his grades when we remembered to ask. I’m pretty sure he got some sort of C in a physics course due (according to him) lab grades where he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t meeting expectations. In any event he did well enough in the courses that counted that he got an internship and job at Google. He’d been a stellar student in high school.
And how many study abroad programs have minimum gpa’s as well. It wasn’t like that back in the day. 
My son was valedictorian in HS, but he had a couple of B+ in college - all in core courses that he found dull. His gpa was high enough to not disclude him from jobs and internships, and after that, it was more about what he could accomplish and his skills.